A 9-year-old 3rd-grader from Missouri created the winning design that was selected from more than 33,000 student submissions from all over the country in the Doodle 4 Google competition. She received a $15,000 college scholarship, a netbook computer and a $25,000 technology grant for a new computer lab at her school. Her doodle was also featured on the Google.com homepage today (May 27, 2010) for millions of people to enjoy all across the country.

The Doodle 4 Google competition invites K-12 students to work their artistic will upon the Google homepage logo. This year's theme was "If I Could Do Anything, I Would …"
http://www.google.com/doodle4google/

I think she may have won partly because she chose to draw a rainforest habitat and wanted to ("if she could do anything, she would") save the rainforest. There were quite a few that were good artwork but chose other themes besides saving the environment.